Eighty Years (or so) To The Big Zero

I was playing board games on Saturday at the local Piteria - there is a regular Saturday board gaming group that meets and since I like board games and the people there are patient and never yell at me for not immediately getting the rules I go every now and again. I’m slow with rules but when I finally get them I really like the games and can play fairly well.

Right, what’s the point of this post?

Ok so I was talking with the Master of the Gaming Group who I shall refer to as Master R. Why is this person the Master? Well anyone who arrives to a gaming group with no less than three iMac boxes filled with games is really into games. When they know how to play and stomp you at every game in their possession = Master.

So I was talking with Master R. and he mentioned he doesn’t own a car. What?! Oh that’s right he, does own a car but takes the bus everywhere.

“But I’m way out in the middle of nowhere. The city doesn’t go out that way.” Says I.

“Oh, you rules ignorant fool. You can take route X to route Y, transfer at P to double back through Y and transfer again to B to meet the M bus which is always late by five minutes and the one you really want, but instead of standing on the street corner for twenty minutes you might as well enjoy the ride on P and B which takes you by the beautiful lake pond where you can watch the ducks and swans. Hey, it’s your turn. Pay attention! ” *smack*

“All right! Do you have any hearts?”

Blink. Blink. “This is San Juan, there are no hearts.”

Later at home I looked up the bus routes in the area and to my surprise there is a park and ride not fifteen minutes from my house.

It takes 45 minutes to get to work. If I took the park and ride it would take 45 minutes. But I won’t have to drive through traffic and could sleep, read, or just hang on the bus for the ride.

The only consideration is it worth the $41.25 per month to use the bus twice a day Mon-Fri? Would it really save that much gas? It would definitely save on the wear and tear on my car.

I’m still looking into it and will be riding the bus this week on a trail run and see how long it really takes and how difficult it is to transfer to the other bus. I don’t have to work for another week so I’ll see how it goes.

BTW - San Juan is a great game.

The Daily Commute, Thinking out loud

I created the icons and exercise chart table on the “Road to Mt. Olympus” page. I considered Ripped like Buddha (because it’s much funnier than my current title and more … umm.. accurate) as the title but considering it’s a page keeping track of positive progress I didn’t want to be too negative even for a laugh.

I’ve gotten a lot of good advice and all for recipes and cooking. Something that seems like a good idea is getting a rice cooker. There is a $20 one from Target with a steamer at the top.

I’m debating whether the cost of a rice cooker to cook healthy food is warrented since I can cook rice in a pot at any time. But there are advantages to a rice cooker. I definitely need new pots and pans. The ones I have now I’ve had since 1998 (and longer) and the non-stick surface and bottoms are looking really bad. I’m cooking with a copper bottom pot my mom got me a while ago and that is keeping up nicely if a pain since I only have one and must constantly clean it. I looked into getting new pots and pans before this year started but I just didn’t know what I’ll need for these recipes and what I may be cooking and since they were all $20+ per pot/pan I decided to hold off on that.

If I’m to eat better in this experiment I may need to purchase better tools toward that end. I’ll give January a trial run with the kitchen stuff I have and then make a decision in February.

See, being reasonably frugal already. (Did you know all right is two words? Alright - which I have used for nearly two decades - is considered nonstandard English and wrong. Just a little something I picked up the other day. All right then on with the post.)

I’ll be posting as time permits and I begin to more fully fill in the static pages of the site. As always free to post comments and suggestions. They are always welcome and helpful.  

Well that’s all I have for now. I’ve bought better food, I’ve got some links to consignment shops in my area which may be interested in my extra clothing, electronics and such to get additional income, and I have an exercise plan ready to be used. I’m all geared up for the new year.

Should be interesting.

A Whole New You

The Guidelines for the next Six Months.

I’m calling them guidelines because life doesn’t run on rules. (Except quantum rules which are more guidelines than rules anyway depending on when and who is watching at the time.)

So as a brief outline of how I’m going to go about this experiment I’ve broken it down into parts:
Money
Health/Fitness
Entertainment/Sanity
Automotive
Land and Home

First the Money. I have certain expenses that must be paid. Mortgage, Student Fucking Loan (I have a theory on this which I may resurrect in this blog.), Gas, Bills, etc. These will be paid but some don’t need to be as high as they are and through selective changes in daily choices I can reduce them. Gas for example, as well as electricity oh and food. Eating out while tasty really hurts the bottom line.My ultimate goal is to pay off my credit cards which will save me several hundreds upon hundreds of dollars per month in money thrown away. Looking back everything purchased on those cards seemed necessary, of course that was five plus years ago. Not very necessary now. 8^( So I will be focusing a significant portion of my time on acquiring legal means of getting more money while at the same time reducing the amount of money I spend. Check out my Hawking Wares section for occasion deals.

Health/Fitness
I’m big boned. No really I am. Ok. I’m just overweight. No one’s fault but my own. And the computers. I hate computers. They made me fat. Oh, and ice cream, potato chips and cheese. They made me fat also. I’m not really fat but I am no where near what I use to be even when I was 27 which was five years after leaving the USMC. When I was in the USMC I was a lean mean killing machine, but never got to do anything with that. It definitely didn’t attract the ladies even though I was ripped like a Greek God. Now I’m ripped like Buddha. I blame the computers and the dew and crown. Lots and lots of Crown. Oh and metabolism. Stupid metabolism. Well I may not be able to become my former Greek God like self but I can at least work on limiting my resemblance to a beer swilling redneck with built in beer tray just under the chin. Not that there’s anything wrong with red necks or beer trays, I just don’t want my stomach to be used as one. (As a side note, I don’t drink a lot of beer, mostly soda and in 2000 I would rest my Dew on my stomach while watching Star Trek Voyager. One day I looked down and blinked, cried a little and since then I put my soda on the tv tray next to the futon. Those days are long gone and now I only have room for shot glasses.)So in an effort to get out of the house, improve the bod (for myself first and the ladies second) I’ll be starting up my fitness routine again: Walking/Running, Sit-ups, Push-Ups, Dips, etc, disc golf, and more physically active diversions of entertainment.

Something that will hurt the budget on food will I’ll be buying more fresh foods for cooking. I’m gonna try to learn how to cook more than rice and chicken. Even though I can cook the hell out of rice and chicken (with cheese slices for cheesy goodness), I gonna need to expand my meal choices. And that means more juice (soda is covered under entertainment), and more fruits and vegetables. They are two different types of food right?

I thought of taking pictures of my physical appearance – one picture a week – but am not sure about that. I don’t want to be sued for physiological trauma. I’ll come up with something.

Entertainment/Sanity
Without entertainment the mind goes crazy. (Ref. The Shining) Now I’m running on all cylinders now, they just misfire now and again. (Ask my friends.) Truth be told I have plenty of hobbies already available around my house, I just can’t get to them through all the SHIT stacked everywhere. I’m sorry I don’t mean to yell. I mean precious mementos of my life to date. Most of which were acquired while in the service which was then merged with all the stuff I had while in high school and it then turned into a George Carlin skit as I got to college. I will be weeding through that, but that’s under the Home aspects of this experiment.

Thinking out loud

So on the 25th of this month I had one cup of Cookies and Cream ice cream, a bowl of Cape Cod 40% Fat Free potato chips (I really don’t think it matters), and a bag of buttery Orvelle 94% fat free popcorn. That night I slept from 10pm to about noon the next day.

I think getting back on a healthy track may just override my financial goals this next six months. They are fleshy neck and fleshy neck in the running.

So the next day I went to the Grocery store and bought some tomatos which I’ll put into my rice and chicken. I bought some watermelon and cantelope bowls for snacking and apricots. I really like apricots. But as I opened them up after a night in the fridge and was eating a few, I read the top. “Sulfur Dioxide used as a preservative.” !!

That’s the pillowly gas that comes out of volcanoes. It’s the stuff that is used to make acid rain. And I looked it up online and it turns out it doesn’t really preserve the food from rotting, only the appearance of the food so it doesn’t look like it’s not rotting. So you could be eating rotten apricots and not know it because the apricots look perfectly yellow-orange’ish and is still firm yet squishy.

I took them back to Publix and got my money back. Maybe I over reacted. Maybe it’s best not to know how food is actually stored for months upon months at a time in warehouses before being delivered to the local store?

But if the alternative is farming out my food in the backyard I’ll just be a little more careful when buying stuff next time. (Have you seen my backyard? I have and there’s no way I’m eating anything that grows out of that soil.)

A Whole New You

I have uploaded the data set for my car’s mileage and gas purchases from April-October of 2006. It’s in the Daily Commute page in the upper right column. Every time I made a stop I recorded the information and later entered it into a spreadsheet.

I will be doing this again during the six months starting in January.

For the curious my car is a 1996 Geo Metro. I have driven this car across the country; along the spine of the country from Maryland through Ohio to Indiana and then south through Kansas to Texas, from Texas through Kentucky to Maryland, from Maryland to West Palm Beach Florida, and WPB to Texas for a total of about 9 times. (The first 7 times without a radio. But no worries during long trips I’d play fun games like “I spy” to pass the time. When I arrived in the town I live in now, I finally put a radio in the car. Those carefree gaming days are over. Besides I was getting tired of losing all the time. )

Well more on that later.

And so after 11 years of extensive travel across this great rocky, hilly, snowy, rainy and sunny land my car is really showing its age. I fear that it may die during this experiment. If so I will have to get another car which will be a huge expense and something new. So that is a necessary caveat during this Six Months to Reset experiment.

But when/if I do need a new car you can bet it will be the most efficient car available within my means. I’m currently leaning toward the Toyota Prius and the Toyota Corrola.

And to those who ask why not buy American cars you have a Chervolet now? I say, fuck the American Automotive Industry. For fifteen years they built nothing but gas gussling SUVs and trucks with no innovation other than how many cup holders can be put in the middle seat and the installation of tiny television screens in the head rests. They had no vision, no conscious of the future and now are paying the price while others pay an even higher price to salvage and bail them out of the hole they dug for themselves and to a larger extent the country. (I don’t put the blame all on the big three, the sheep who purchase these vechicles garner some of the blame as well. But to be fair, they were up against some pretty serious marketing/advertising and social pressures to purchase these types of vechicles, especially considering those were mostly all that were being offered.)

This recent 35 mpg legislation is bullshit also. 35! That’s an average for every car the company builds. So they can build one whole mess of cars and the average needs to be 35, not the minimum for all. That’s not innovation that’s a numbers game. And by 2020! What the fuck is that about? That’s not change that’s slow as molassis growth. With or without this legislation by 2020 average mpg would have increased by market pressures alone. Especially after the world (and hopefully Americas) started getting their spine back against corporate interests and excessive consumerism - hopefully. (Something has to give soon.) 2020! Who the hell do they think they are fooling here? Apparently everyone.

You want to really make a car that will sell? Build a car that gets 100 miles to the gallon and you would be on top of the world. And if you had built it 15 years, nar 10 years ago, there would be no financial crisis for your business and people would have bought that car in droves even in the mid 1990s. I know I would. If it was up to me it’d be 100 mpg in three to five years and if you can’t keep up sell to someone who can and get out of the way. The times they are a’ changing! (I wonder why the auto industry hasn’t been to interested in building gasoline efficient cars for a while now? Seems to me if they had, some global crisises might have been avoided or at least lost the influence and false sense of urgency subtly driving them. But that’s just crazy talk.)

Well I’m getting into a rant and this was suppose to be just an update to the Daily Commute to give you an idea of how that part will work. Data under the page and rants and commentary in the blog posts.

Until then.

The Daily Commute

This website will go live starting in January 2008.
At that time I will embark on a challenging experiment to cut through the jungle of tangles that have consumed and hindered my life.

To Purchase:
Nothing new
Nothing charged
Only the essentials (clearly defined before hand) and even that definition may become leaner as I work to hit the “Reset Button” on my life; before conditioning, before consumption, before debt.

I will write about (and in some cases itemize) this journey on this site.
My birthday is in July hence the six month goal. I want to be finished before July 1st.

Thinking out loud